AdamZ
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2005
- Messages
- 14,866
- Location
- Montgomery County PA
- Display Name
Display name:
Adam Zucker
Yup, you are right about that. My daughter's MacBook is beyond the extended AppleCare warranty we bought.
Mac Book
- Thread starter AdamZ
- Start date
Yup, you are right about that. My daughter's MacBook is beyond the extended AppleCare warranty we bought.
TangoWhiskey
Touchdown! Greaser!
Just in time computing. Love it.
masloki
Pattern Altitude
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2011
- Messages
- 2,041
- Display Name
Display name:
Nunya
Oh yeah, and do regular backups. Just had a MacBook Air lose its hard drive completely. Waiting to hear if it is the drive or mobo, but i was worried SSDs wouldn't be able to carry on the fine tradition of spectacular and abrupt failures.
flyingcheesehead
Touchdown! Greaser!
Amen. I just had a 3rd-party hard drive fry suddenly on my MacBook Pro, one reason for my absence the last several days. And while I used to rely on my geek skills in these situations, this time it wouldn't have done any good: The hard drive refused to spin up at all. Very happy I had a full backup on my Time Capsule.
denverpilot
Tied Down
My Time Capsule got toasted in the lightning strike. I replaced it with a Buffalo LinkStation with RAID 1 for 1/3 the cost. It's also upgradable to 3TB drives for either 3TB RAID 1, or 6TB as two separate 3TB single disks.
In many cases, Apple hardware is so well integrated, you gotta go with it... And back when I bought the Time Capsule, it was the best game in town.
But the Buffalo is seen as a Time Machine device right out of the box. The Macs all think it's a shared Apple network disk. (It also acts as a shared iTunes library but I haven't played with that feature yet.)
The only downside is that I got the non-Pro Buffalo, older model, slower CPU inside, so copying 500+GB to it was an all-night and part of the next day affair over Ethernet. Incrementals over WiFi are fine, but that initial machine backup was a doozie. (The Buffalo is Ethernet only.)
On the pro-Apple front, I picked up two of the new 2/5 GHz simultaneous dual band Airport Express access points instead of one AirPort Extreme or another brand. Nice of them to move the tech from the Extreme (minus the larger antennas) into the Express.
Now I not only have roaming coverage between the two APs seamlessly anywhere in the house (making 5GHz available and fast as heck everywhere including the backyard), but can play iTunes stuff to the speaker jacks on both WiFi routers from any of the Macs or iDevices. Nifty!
In many cases, Apple hardware is so well integrated, you gotta go with it... And back when I bought the Time Capsule, it was the best game in town.
But the Buffalo is seen as a Time Machine device right out of the box. The Macs all think it's a shared Apple network disk. (It also acts as a shared iTunes library but I haven't played with that feature yet.)
The only downside is that I got the non-Pro Buffalo, older model, slower CPU inside, so copying 500+GB to it was an all-night and part of the next day affair over Ethernet. Incrementals over WiFi are fine, but that initial machine backup was a doozie. (The Buffalo is Ethernet only.)
On the pro-Apple front, I picked up two of the new 2/5 GHz simultaneous dual band Airport Express access points instead of one AirPort Extreme or another brand. Nice of them to move the tech from the Extreme (minus the larger antennas) into the Express.
Now I not only have roaming coverage between the two APs seamlessly anywhere in the house (making 5GHz available and fast as heck everywhere including the backyard), but can play iTunes stuff to the speaker jacks on both WiFi routers from any of the Macs or iDevices. Nifty!
bbchien
Touchdown! Greaser!
Until it loses a sector. I have a 5/2012 Acer i5 Superbook with the 240 G SSD. It blew a sector about 3 weeks ago, and it was in the OS.
So it came back with a Win7 64 reinstall, and I'm reloading all my stuff.
....I'm just sayin.....
denverpilot
Tied Down
There really aren't any sectors in an SSD. A major error in the hardware may show up as that, since the computer doesn't know it's not really a spinning platter hard disk.
Specifically drives with TRIM command support, which allows the operating system to tell the SSD when data has truly been deleted so the controller inside the SSD can have it back for load-leveling, etc. Built into Windows and Mac, but disabled by default on Mac unless the disk is an specific model number supplied by Apple. Can be turned on for non-Apple drives via command line or simple App. See speed tweaks article below.
The actual internal goofiness inside SSDs is pretty high.
Here's an article about a popular chipset ("sandforce") in 2010. It talks about the "spare area" set aside in the internal memory pool for various tasks. All SSDs set aside some memory for lifespan when other memory locations physically wear out. The disk's own board controller utilizes this area until its gone, then real failures start to happen. Heavy write/delete cycles will speed up an SSDs death, the older the SSD, the less smart the on board controller chipset. The more wear on the memory.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3690/...andforce-more-capacity-at-no-performance-loss
Lots of stuff going on in there.
Recent work seems to be going toward motherboard chipsets that can truly utilize TRIM on RAID devices, which most don't today. Single drives, it's been working on modern OSs for a while now. Older OSs beat up SSDs.
Also written in 2010, but applicable to older SSDs that weren't yet optimized to act more like hard drives...
http://www.speedguide.net/articles/ssd-speed-tweaks-3319&print=friendly
Lots more out there. Just the tip of the iceberg.
Specifically drives with TRIM command support, which allows the operating system to tell the SSD when data has truly been deleted so the controller inside the SSD can have it back for load-leveling, etc. Built into Windows and Mac, but disabled by default on Mac unless the disk is an specific model number supplied by Apple. Can be turned on for non-Apple drives via command line or simple App. See speed tweaks article below.
The actual internal goofiness inside SSDs is pretty high.
Here's an article about a popular chipset ("sandforce") in 2010. It talks about the "spare area" set aside in the internal memory pool for various tasks. All SSDs set aside some memory for lifespan when other memory locations physically wear out. The disk's own board controller utilizes this area until its gone, then real failures start to happen. Heavy write/delete cycles will speed up an SSDs death, the older the SSD, the less smart the on board controller chipset. The more wear on the memory.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3690/...andforce-more-capacity-at-no-performance-loss
Lots of stuff going on in there.
Recent work seems to be going toward motherboard chipsets that can truly utilize TRIM on RAID devices, which most don't today. Single drives, it's been working on modern OSs for a while now. Older OSs beat up SSDs.
Also written in 2010, but applicable to older SSDs that weren't yet optimized to act more like hard drives...
http://www.speedguide.net/articles/ssd-speed-tweaks-3319&print=friendly
Lots more out there. Just the tip of the iceberg.